PlayStation 3
Publisher: Atlus Vincent is 32 years old and living in a rut. He’s been going out with his girlfriend, Katherine, for five years, but they still live apart. She’s starting to hint at marriage, or at least that she wants more from life than this. He wants things to continue as they are—dating a nice girl, boozing with his high school friends after work, and generally accomplishing nothing. One night he has too much to drink, and the next morning he wakes up in bed next to a blond girl named Catherine. The last thing he remembers is her asking if she could sit with him at the bar. Another thing about Vincent: He has nightmares. Every night he dreams of climbing an endless tower that’s always collapsing beneath him. He’s surrounded by sheep, but like Vincent, each sheep sees himself—and only himself—as a man. All speak of cheating on their wives or girlfriends. In the waking world, rumors spread that men who cheat are cursed and that if you dream of falling and don’t wake up before you land, you die. The news is filled with reports of men who’ve died in their sleep, expressions of terror on their faces. Catherine is the latest video game by Atlus, and it’s very strange. It’s by the same creative team who handled the last two Persona games (3 and 4), which I love and have described as hybrids of a dungeon crawler and a dating sim. Catherine is a hybrid of a block-climbing puzzle game and an adultery sim. Play takes place in two modes. In the evenings, Vincent drinks at his favorite bar, the Stray Sheep. You sit, drink, talk with your friends, get up to chat with other patrons, and answer text messages from Katherine or Catherine. Dialogue choices influence the course of the story. After Vincent goes to bed, you play the puzzle stages, which are huge towers where Vincent must push, pull, and climb blocks to reach the top of each stage as the floor collapses below him. The end of each night brings a boss fight, where Vincent scales a tower pursued by a giant monster representing an aspect of his fear of commitment. In between these two stages are cinematics, usually set in or around Vincent’s apartment. Sometimes they’re rendered in the game engine, and other times they’re fully animated. Now, I should say this: I haven’t finished Catherine yet, first because I’m savoring it, and second because it’s too hard. It is absurdly hard. In Japan, the game as it was originally shipped was so challenging that Atlus had to patch it to make it easier. We get the patched version, and it’s still too hard. Even on the secret unlockable Very Easy mode (hold Back or Select on the main menu screen), it is still murderously frustrating. If you can’t stand puzzle games, don’t play Catherine, because you will be playing its puzzles for a long, long time. But the game is well constructed, as is normal for Atlus, and especially for the Persona team. Even when ill conceived, the game is well implemented and presented with fantastic polish. It’s also different from every other title on the market. What I’ve seen of the story so far is engrossing, and the game has eight possible endings. I recommend Catherine on the basis that I applaud imaginative game concepts and lavish production values, and I love any game with a story interesting enough to make me want to talk about it. This review is based on an Xbox 360 copy of Catherine I bought for myself at a retail store.